1. Field of the Invention
Apparatuses, methods and systems consistent with the present invention relate to managing a key in a home network environment, and more particularly to efficiently managing a key even when a home network environment varies.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a home network environment, devices constituting a home network (hereinafter referred to as “home network devices”) are often added or removed by users. Home network devices generally can be classified into devices that are rarely changed after being set, such as televisions (TV), personal computers (PC), and set-top boxes, and devices that are frequently added to or removed from the home network, such as notebook computers and personal digital assistants (PDA).
If the home network devices are changed, a key inherent to the home network (hereinafter referred to as a “home network key”), which generally is required for allowing the home network devices to reproduce a variety of content, is changed and a new key is generated. In this case, at the same time as the changing of the home network key, previous home network keys should be managed by their versions so as to store or reproduce previous content. Thus, there is a problem in that the history of the home network keys must also be managed. Additionally, as an amount of content shared in the home network increases, there is a problem in that much time is required for searching for particular content and a home network key corresponding to the content.